CHAPTER 20
Lorne Michaels wants Richard Pryor. Needs him. Has to have him. Richard Pryor wants Paul Mooney. Without Paul Mooney, Lorne Michaels can’t have Richard Pryor.
Lorne Michaels is the executive producer of Saturday Night Live. NBC’s late-night ensemble sketch show is in its first season, back when it’s called just Saturday Night, because sportscaster Howard Cosell already has a show named Saturday Night Live.
Lorne’s show hasn’t broken out yet. No one’s watching. Nobody knows who the f*ck John Belushi is, or Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, or any of the other cast members.
Because he worked with Richard on the Lily Tomlin special, Lorne knows that the surest way to light a fire under his ratings is to get Richard to guest-host. Richard is hotter than a pistol. That Nigger’s Crazy is taking over the world.
Richard plays hard to get. He doesn’t much like Lorne Michaels. He lays down conditions: I want to bring in my own writers. I want to bring in Shelley, my ex-wife, to do a cameo. I want this. I want that. Lorne keeps saying “okay,” but then he doesn’t do anything. So Richard blows him off.
Richard’s on tour, playing a jai alai arena in Miami, when Lorne and his NBC execs fly down to woo him. Richard tells them he wants black writers on the show.
“I don’t want white people putting words into my mouth,” he says. “I don’t get Paul, you don’t get me.”
Lorne flies me out to meet with them all in Miami. I go into the green room at the jai alai arena and they are all sitting there, Lorne Michaels and his NBC suits. They cross-examine me.
How long have you been writing?
Since your mama aborted you, motherf*cker.
How long have you been doing comedy?
Since your daddy sold your mama’s p-ssy on the street corner, bitch.
All right, so I don’t say anything that balls-out nasty. But I am pissed. What is this? It is like I am in Mississippi, with a bright light shining in my face, having to pass a literacy test to be able to vote. “F*ck you and everybody who looks like you,” I want to say.
The NBC execs are not used to dealing with black writ-ers—not black writers with power, black writers with leverage over them. They dither. They ask me more questions. They smile and smile. But I see the horns and forked tongues that Richard always sees.
I think about all my nights at the Store and Ye Little Club, I think about Maverick’s Flat and Redd Foxx’s, I think about the circus and Joe and Eddie and Dance Party and Sanford and Son and all my other gigs stretching back to infinity. I’ve paid my dues. Have you, motherf*ckers?
But I am calm. I know that Lorne doesn’t have any choice. He wants his show to succeed. He wants the hottest comic in the country to appear on Saturday Night. George Carlin didn’t do it for him, or Paul Simon, Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, or any of the other people he’s had in to guest-host.
Lorne has to have Richard. I go into these ridiculous meetings knowing I’m going to get hired. We’re in New York at the NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center a month later.
After all the posturing with the suits—like some cons facing off in the yard of San Quentin or something—Richard and I fit right in with the Saturday Night Live crew. Richard immediately strikes up a friendship with John Belushi. They bond as drug buddies.
The set is nothing but a crackhouse. Weed and heroin and pills. Plus plenty of Richard’s favorite, cocaine.
The other writers start off by calling Richard “Dick Pryor.” I know Richard. “Dick” reminds him of the early days, when nobody respected him. I know that I can call him that (though I almost never do), maybe Jim Brown and a few other people can call him that, but out of anyone else’s mouth it feels like they’re talking down to him. He sets them straight. I guess this scares Michael O’Donoghue, the show’s head writer. We don’t see him again for the whole week.
Garrett Morris, the token Negro in the ensemble, isn’t in any of the sketches we work on. I think, Why not? Is there a quota in place? Richard and I both secretly regard Morris as a perfect Negro, specializing in clownish comedy. He doesn’t seem to be a part of the ensemble, like he’s some separate but equal cast member.
When Richard hears NBC has put a seven-second delay in place for just this show, he blows up. None of the other hosts get this restriction, just Richard. It’s crap. It’s demeaning. But it’s in their nature. Anything the white man can do to control a black man, they will do.
During rehearsals—whenever he manages to show up at them and is not boycotting the show in a funk—Richard unleashes a string of “motherf*cker’s” and “nigger’s” in his act. Lorne freaks out. The other members of the cast are mostly too stoned to follow the battles being waged right underneath their coke-encrusted noses.
Except for Chevy Chase. He keeps sending emissaries to me, script assistants and staff writers. They ask meekly, “Could you please write something for Chevy and Richard?” He arranges for Lorne to sit down with me and plead his case. Toward the end of the week, as the Saturday show time approaches, he starts following me around himself, like a lamb after Bo Peep.
“Richard hates me, doesn’t he?” Chevy asks me.
“He doesn’t hate you,” I say, even though I know Richard does indeed despise Chevy.
Chevy’s not convinced. He goes off muttering to himself. “Richard hates me, Richard hates me, Richard hates me.” Like it’s his mantra or something.
Soon enough he’s back tugging on my sleeve. “Write something for us, will you?” he pleads. “I have to get some air time with Richard.”
Finally, in the early afternoon on Thursday, I hand Lorne a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?”
“You’ve all been asking me to put Chevy and Richard together,” I say.
After all the bullshit I’ve been put through to get here, the f*cking cross-examination Lorne subjects me to, I decide to do a job interview of my own.
Chevy’s the boss, interviewing Richard for a janitor’s job. The white personnel interviewer suggests they do some word association, so he can test if the black man’s fit to employ. He kicks it off:
Chevy Chase: White.
Richard: Black.
Chase: Bean.
Richard: Pod.
Chase: Negro.
Richard: Whitey.
Chase: Tar baby.
Richard [miffed]: What did you say?
Chase: Tar baby.
Richard: Ofay.
Chase: Colored.
Richard [bringing it]: Redneck!
Chase: Jungle bunny!
Richard: Peckerwood!
Chase: Burrhead!
Richard: Cracker.
Chase: Spearchucker.
Richard: White trash!
Chase: Jungle bunny!
Richard: Honky!
Chase: Spade!
Richard: Honky! Honky!
Chase: Nigger!
Richard: Dead honky!
Easiest sketch I ever write. All I do is bring out what is going on beneath the surface of that interview with Lorne and the NBC execs in the jai alai green room.
Meanwhile, I am monitoring Richard’s drug intake. He’s getting more and more cranked the closer we get to show-time. The whole cast is. I know the werewolf is going to come out, and I don’t want to be collateral damage, so I get the f*ck out of there and head back to California.
That Saturday, December 13, 1975, the bit kills when Richard and Chevy do it in front of the live studio audience. Even watching it on television, I can hear gasps and hollers in between the panicked laughter.
Richard’s appearance puts Saturday Night Live on the map. It’s a huge event, a water-cooler kind of success. Gil Scott-Heron does a great rendition of his antiapartheid anthem, “Johannesburg.”
There are other bits, other sketches. We open the show with a plant in the audience standing up and saying, “I know who killed Kennedy!” Then, BANG!—a gunshot rings out, he drops dead, and we segue into Chevy Chase: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” In another skit, Dan Aykroyd sees his whole family turn black on him.
For all the upheaval beforehand, the show actually appears smooth and tight. It’s a miracle. NBC is stunned when they see that the rerun of the show the next spring actually scores a higher rating than the original. Word of mouth is that good.
But it’s the job interview sketch that everyone talks about. It attains the status of comedy classic. It’s like an H-bomb that Richard and I toss into America’s consciousness. All that shit going on behind closed doors is now out in the open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
The N-word as a weapon, turned back against those who use it, has been born on national TV. Together with That Nigger’s Crazy and his concert tour, Richard’s Saturday Night Live guest-hosting appearance lends his career a terrifying kind of energy.
The boulder is rolling now. Bouncing downhill, smashing everything in its way. The Richard Pryor Celebrity Express picks up speed and momentum. I figure I have to make sure I do only two things. One, figure out some way to push it so that it gets going even faster. Two, avoid getting run over.
In a television studio in Burbank, we get the boulder rolling faster, all right, but it rolls over us at the same time.